This invention relates to compliant fluid-film bearings, and more particularly to a resilient support element for supporting a flexible bearing sheet in a compliant hydrodynamic fluid-film bearing.
Recent developments in the field of compliant hydrodynamic gas bearings have dramatically improved the load carrying capacity and stability of these bearings so that they are becoming increasingly attractive for use in a wide variety of ordinary high-speed bearing applications. In the past, these bearings have been used primarily in ultra-high-speed and hostile environment applications in which conventional bearings were completely unsuitable. Although these compliant hydrodynamic gas bearings performed adequately under their design conditions, they did not always have a good tolerance for shock, misalignment, or radical departures from the design load conditions. Therefore, these bearings have not found wide application in ordinary commercial and industrial products primarily because of the lack of control over the use of these products and the consequent wide variety of abuse situations to which they can be subjected.
Recent improvements in compliant hydrodynamic gas bearings are changing this situation. These improvements greatly increase the range of conditions under which these bearings can operate reliably so that they are now more suitable for use in ordinary industrial and consumer products.
To make the hydrodynamic compliant gas bearing realize its potential and gain widespread acceptance for the ordinary industrial and consumer products market, I believe certain improvements in the structure of the bearing would be desirable. One such improvement is manufacturability. The bearing must be manufacturable in large quantities with few, if any, rejects. Rejects, or inoperative bearings, have not been uncommon in the past. This situation has been tolerated because the bearings were for special-purpose, high-technology products that were manufactured in small quantities, so each bearing could be tested prior to assembly in the machine. Therefore, a high proportion of rejects affected the total cost of the product relatively insignificantly. As a high-volume manufactured product, however, this situation would be intolerable because of the need to protect each bearing would increase the cost of the bearing so much that it would not be competitive with conventional bearings despite its functional advantages.
The other essential improvement that must be made in compliant hydrodynamic fluid-film bearings before they can be accepted commercially is the broadening of the range of conditions under which they operate reliably. These conditions relate primarily to misalignment, thermal distortion, and shock tolerance; adequate load capacity at low speed as well as high speed; and bearing stability under all conditions of loading. The improvements made recently in these bearings have dramatically improved the range, but further improvements in the maximum load capacity and in the tolerance to normally encountered use and manufacturing aberations will accelerate the commercial acceptance of these bearings.